Chapter Text
Darkness.
Nothing but darkness.
He tries to move, to reach out, to do anything, but any movement seemed to be swallowed by tendrils of inky blackness.
And then- Light- Warmth- Laughter as someone shoves him playfully. A reassuring hand on his shoulder. A familiar face, looking so much like his, yet with differences only they can see. Smiles and tears and everything, anything, something-
Nothing.
He’s
F
A
L
L
I
N
G
Down and down and down.
Someone screams. It’s not him. He wishes it was.
He’s drowning and dying and being revived and feeling nothing at all- no, not nothing, there’s numbness crawling through his veins like poison, like smoke, consuming him. He feels someone shaking him, but he doesn’t respond. Vaguely, he can here someone calling a name (his name), but it’s not the right one. Every name besides one sounds like a betrayal.
A voice (his again, though he doesn’t recognize it), croaks and strains and utters a single word, though it feels like so, so much more.
“Jericho.”
oooooooo
Call wakes up.
It’s nothing dramatic, because this isn’t a book or a movie, and rather than having his eyes fly open like he’s possessed, they slowly part to reveal the stone ceiling.
He’s breathing hard, like he’s run a marathon (or walked a mile; with his leg, it’s virtually the same thing), and he can feel the sweat cooling on his skin. He lays in bed for a few moments, trying to catch his breath and not give in to his urge to throw up over the side of the bed.
Once he’s sure that he can get up without swooning like some sort of damsel, he swings his legs over the side of the mattress and hobbles out of his bedroom. He collapses on one of the couches in the main room, and absentmindedly runs his hands through Havoc’s fur.
This is hardly the first nightmare Call’s had. He’s been subject to nightly terrors ever since the night at the bowling alley; most of them featuring some deranged version of Master Joseph and the silver mask. This particular brand of nightly entertainment, however, had only started about a week ago, two days after the events at the “tomb”. To say that Call is sleep-deprived is an understatement. He hasn’t gotten more than three hours of sleep per night. The bags under his eyes are slowly turning the same color as the void.
The thing that has Call the most worried, however, isn’t the lack of sleep, but rather the subject of his night terrors. They seem less like nightmares and more like… well, memories. His wolf peers up at him with sleepy eyes and Call buries his face in his soft coat. Havoc whines pitifully, as if to ask his what’s wrong, but Call just closes his eyes and tries to convince himself that it’s all just a figment of his imagination, that he’s not actually remembering things that are better left unremembered.
It doesn’t work.
oooooooo
It’s getting harder to hide it.
He sees the concern in their gazes when they think he’s not looking. Tamara’s forced casual air when she asks him how he slept. He can hear her and Aaron’s worried voices drifting through the door while he’s “sleeping”. Celia frowns at the dark bags with concern, and even Jasper approaches him once or twice to ask how he’d doing.
He knows that keeping all of this from his friends is scoring him some major Evil Overlord points, but he just can’t bring himself to explain to them that he’s remembering things from his past life, that his memory is slowly being built back up, and have the fragile trust between them shattered.
Things come to a head (god, he can’t even think those two words without feeling sick to his stomach) on a Friday while they’re having dinner in the Refectory. He’s eating with his friends, staring into space and trying not to fall asleep on the spot, when he feels a hand tap his shoulder.
He sluggishly turns his head around and blinks a few times before his tired brain finally processes that it’s Alex Strike standing there, looking uncharacteristically nervous. He gives a small, quick smile.
“Hey Call,” Alex says, “Can I talk to you for a moment?”
The words take a moment to register in his exhausted brain, but he finds his reply quickly enough. He glances over at the table, where Aaron and Jasper are having a heated debate about the best way to put out a fire, and makes eye contact with Tamara who gives him a ‘go ahead’ gesture
“Uh, sure.”
“Let’s take a walk.”
They set off at a slow pace, walking around the empty tunnels of the Magisterium without a true destination in mind. Alex tries for conversation, and after a while they’re chatting casually as they wander around. They talk about the best flavor of lichen and briefly chat about Kimiya, and Alex doesn’t seem bothered when the conversation stutters into silence a few times.
When they’re only moments away from the Refectory entrance, Alex stops him and hands over a bottle filled with a shimmery white liquid.
“What’s this?” he asks curiously, once it’s in his hands.
“A sleeping solution,” Alex answers, and before he can say anything, plows on, “I know you probably don’t want to Call, but seriously? You’re worrying everyone, even me, and those bags under your eyes aren’t getting any lighter.”
He grumbles something about not needing any help and being perfectly fine, but he pockets the bottle anyway, and pretends not to notice Alex’s proud grin.
He also pretends not to notice when Aaron and Tamara come back five minutes late from dinner, both wearing matching expressions of relief on their faces, and the way they shoot each other satisfied smiles when he says he’s going to bed.
oooooooo
The potion doesn’t really help the nightmares (memories, a voice in his head hisses), no surprise there, but at least now, when he wakes up sweating and shaking, it’s eight hours later. The bags under his eyes slowly fade, until they’re barely noticeable, and it becomes much easier to pretend he’s alright when he’s slept for more than two hours.
He’s still remembering, and he’s still scared, but at least this way, he’s the only one who has to worry about it.
oooooooo
He isn’t quite sure when it started, but all of a sudden classes start seeming suspiciously easy.
He’s always known that he's good at magic. He must have some potential, or else he doubts that Master Rufus would have chosen him, gut instinct or no (he still sometimes wonders at the absurdity of it all). But now, everything seems almost too simple. He passes through evaluations as effortlessly as eating an ice cream sundae. He preforms new spells perfectly on the first try, and sometimes he understands lessons before they’re even finished.
Makar lessons, though, are where everything seems almost too easy. At first, it’s one on one lessons with Master Rufus, so he doesn’t understand the strange glances for what they really are. To him, he’s moving at a completely normal pace, mastering control of the void without much difficulty. But when he joins up with Aaron he realizes that the ease with which he summons and harnesses the dark magic isn't considered natural.
Lessons with Aaron help, though; his friend shoots him warning glances when he starts to show that Chaos magic comes as easily to him as breathing. So he reigns back his power a bit and makes sure that he’s never too far ahead of his friend.
It only starts to make him really nervous when he starts getting spells of potent deja-vu almost every day.
But he can’t bring himself to completely stall his magic, because he wants to keep this to himself. Whenever he uses Chaos, he feels powerful, something he doesn’t feel often when both Aaron and Tamera are so much better then him when it comes to everything else. Not to mention the state of his leg. He knows that the Evil Overlord points are racking up big time, but he can’t stop when it feels so right. This is his.
oooooooo
He overhears Master Rufus and Master Milagros talking in the halls.
“-and it’s rather incredible. I do believe he qualifies as a prodigy.”
“Really?”
“Yes, although the ease at which he completes tasks is a bit terrifying, to be honest. It’s as if he doesn’t even have to think.”
“It could just be luck, Rufus. Or he could just be working exceptionally hard.”
“Perhaps.”
After that, he finds it much easier to try to convince them all that he is most defiantly not a prodigy.
oooooooo
He doesn’t realize something’s really wrong until so, so much later.
They’re going out on a mission, and this time the Masters have left them to partner up on their own. Normally, he and Aaron would be together, seeing as the whole “counterweight” business was pretty serious. But Master Rufus had forbidden any Chaos magic, and so Aaron had decided to partner up with Tamara.
(He tries so hard to not feel bitter about that)
He’s standing awkwardly to the side when Celia comes bounding up to him.
“Call! Be my partner?” she beams, smiling brightly.
“Me?” he’s not really that surprised, to be honest, but he pretends to be anyway.
“Well yeah. Your name is Callum Hunt, right?” she teases, dragging him by the arm to collect their assignment.
He laughs along with the rest of them, pastes a smile on his face for the rest of the mission, and is a perfect ray of sunshine throughout the entire day. (Which really should be the first clue that something's wrong. On his best days, he is nothing more than a sarcastic brat.) But on the inside, he feels like screaming. Because he doesn’t know anymore.
He doesn’t know.
oooooooo
He runs.
There’s pain, terrible burning pain, flowing through his blood. His face feels tender, like all the flesh on it has been clawed off, and maybe it has. He can’t think clearly through the spikes of agony that shoot through his body.
Later, when he’s outside and away, away from the burning wreckage that was his life, Master Joseph finds him.
“It’s my fault” he hears himself say, “It all my fault.”
Master Joseph shakes his head, “No. It is not your fault. It is death who took your brother away from you, and it’s death whose enemy you shall become.”
He takes a new name, after that day. His own doesn’t feel like it belongs to him, but rather another lifetime, one where his deepest emotions were that of happiness, and where he would have been frightened by the madness in Joseph’s eyes, rather than intrigued.
He falls through time, seeing flashes of moments before his eyes, like leaves fluttering through a raging storm. Darkness leaking from his hands for the first time. The awed and terrified impressions of teachers, friends. A fire, a body, his hands summoning the void to preserve the remains of a life.
Master Joseph, handing him a silver mask.
His own hands, reaching out to accept it.